I read a comment by a very well known gardening journalist a couple of weeks ago that now was a very good time to plant shallots and onion sets. She clearly lives in that special place where it never rains and the soil falls into a ready tilth at the touch of a fork! Please do not try this in Tatsfield until the end of the month at the earliest! Our heavy clay should be dry enough by the end of the month for light cultivation; trying to ‘hurry it up’ won’t work and will result in a real mess, so please be patient! When conditions improve you can start pruning some shrubs such as roses, Buddleia, Spiraea, Caryopteris and Hypericum. How many fragrant flowers do you have in your garden right now? What a lovely thing to be able to enjoy flower and fragrance in late winter – Mahonia, Hamamellis, Daphne, Lonicera fragrantissima, Sarcococca and many more – buy them now in flower and enjoy them for many years to come! When pruning and tidying up, make sure to check your larger shrubs to see if they have been moved by the high winds. Re-firming them by treading around before applying a mulch can make a big difference to their recovery after a tough winter. Trying to find out how much rain we have had and comparing that against the so called average rainfall is a bit of a tricky business. Sadly my own weather station is no longer working so I would be very interested to hear if anyone has captured our monthly totals from October to January. The Environment Agency tells us that a total of 14” of rain fell from October to December with 4” of rain falling so far this January already – these figures compare with an average of 9" for this period but this is not a reliable figure especially for our particular area – more on this anon! The series of winter storms combined with the heavy rain took its toll of our trees, fences and roof tiles. It is possible that evergreen trees and shrubs have yet to show symptoms of damage in the form of the characteristic ‘scorching’ effect. The wind was mainly from a southerly direction so the damage should be minimal. It is when it blows strongly from the east to north east that the damage can occur. If February is not a drier month and we have more wind, I fear that more trees and fences will come down as the ground is very wet around roots and foundations. Jon Allbutt (Tel: 577100 Email: [email protected])
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A new year and a new gardening season starts right here! Here are some top tips for your gardening year: • Identify specific areas of your garden dedicated to wildlife – not as difficult as you might think. Leave perennial flower heads on the plant as long a possible to be a food source for seed-eating garden birds. Don’t be too tidy under hedges and at the back of shrub borders. Think about planting shrubs, perennials and bedding plants that are good for pollinating insects – have a look on the RHS website ww.rhs.org.uk for lists of plants that will encourage bees and hoverflies and many other valuable wildlife species. • Plan for your vegetables now and order seed – avoid F1 Hybrids as they are very expensive, you get fewer seeds in the packet and all the plants produce crops at the same time; OK if you have a large hungry family! • Have a look around the garden now and count how many winter and early fragrant spring flowering plants you have. Now is the time to buy and plant these super plants. I have Lonicera fragrantissima (Winter Honeysuckle), Hamamellis pallida (Witch Hazel) and Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Posthill' in flower, all hardy plants that will give me much pleasure for weeks to come. • Prune apples and pears and remember to prune again to shorten back the annual shoots in late July to help form fruit buds. Prune Wisteria now, and again in the late summer to remove those long straggly annual shoots and get more flower. • Join the Tatsfield Horticultural Society, come to our Shows and the Gardening Club – we also have vacancies on the Committee just waiting for you! The mild dry start to the winter was spoilt by the rain in the week before Christmas. This means that we may have lost the chance to dig over our vegetable plots and leave the clay in lumps ready for the frost, if we have any this winter! Be patient with our heavy soil; it will dry and be ready for digging – eventually! I was asked recently why gardening books say that Roses should not be pruned until February/March. Well, pruning them at that time of the year ensures the minimum of time to have raw cut stems before the plant starts to grow. In fact you can prune roses any time during the winter BUT you may get some die back, and you might stimulate a bit too much early growth if the winter is mild and then the new shoots get ‘burnt’ by the late frosts. This will not kill the plant; it just delays growth for a short time while the plant recovers. |
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